1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a codebook excited linear prediction (CELP) coder.
The invention has particular application in digital cellular networks but may also be advantageous in any telecommunications product line that employs low bit rate CELP voice coding.
2. Description of the Related Art
Cellular telecommunications systems in North America are rapidly evolving from their current analog frequency modulated form towards digital systems. Typically, such digital cellular communication systems use a CELP technique for low rate speech coding. The technique involves searching a table or codebook of excitation vectors for that vector which, when filtered through a linear predictive filter, produces an output sequence which is closest to the input sequence. This output sequence of synthesized speech codes occurs upon excitation of the input sequence which in turn occurs upon the introduction of the digital equivalent of analog speech.
While conventional CELP techniques hold the most promise for high quality at bit rates in the vicinity of 8.0 Kbps, the quality suffers at lower bit rates approaching 4.0 Kbps. In particular, because the adaptive codebook in the CELP search loop is quite "flat," i.e. has a restricted variety of adaptive codebook vectors, during unvoiced speech periods, the CELP search loop has difficulty in generating periodic pulses at the onset of voiced speech. Thus, there is often a lag in the time it takes for the adaptive codebook to converge to a pitch pulse structure sufficient to synthesize voiced speech. This typically results in the cutting off of speech, especially during short speech spurts.